The Jeff Koons show at Gagosian Gallery royally sucks. And the fact that LA Times critic David Pagel bothered to dig deeper in order to find something redeeming about these new paintings actually proves how bogus and dishonest and pretentious and superficial the art world can really be — on all levels, right down to the critic for chrissakes. Of course, it's his opinion, and being a critic, one has to believe he has made an earnest assessment of the work he is writing about. But Pagel's critique of Koons' new paintings is just too hard to swallow.
He started off the review with admirable frankness, but then blew it when he decided to do an about-face. He took another look at these works and managed to compare them to Warhol. (Granted, Warhol pretty much sucked in the end, and Koons is frequently compared to him) In the end, he praised them for their genius (these are not quotes, I don't have the review in front of me) and his new view of the paintings was attributed to the fact that the gooey sloshes of paint were not actually paint on top other layers of paint. In fact, there were no areas in the paintings of overlapping paint! OMG! What a fucking accomplishment! Why does that suddenly make them great paintings? This is very puzzling to me, and it seems like Pagel just could not bring himself to call a spade a spade.
The paintings are just plain bad. Also brought up was the minor detail that the paintings are not painted by Koons himself, and his masterminding of these paintings to his lackeys also merited high praise from Pagel. I'm afraid this is just getting all out of hand. Perhaps Pagel is moving with the times, when art stars like Koons get away with just going through the motions fetching big bucks for each work. Everybody's got a make a living I realize, and Koons just knows how to do it really well. But, why can't a critic speak up and say something? I say shame on Pagel for kowtowing to the art world, namely Larry Gagosian.
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